Only on hacker news would someone post about a very good take on the problems of our society and then everyone's comment is arguing over semantics. Happens every time on here.
100 years of whatever this will be
581–590 of 924 posts
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that regulation can and should be a good thing, to protect the participants of the financial system. But in the past decades we've seen a (lobbied) shift towards deregulation, with catastrophic results: > Say what you like about regulators - and they regularly mess up big - but they ensure that 99% of consumer finance companies have the cash to back up deposits because they are forced to! In the 2008 subprime…
I think you're missing a key point that because of the 2008 crisis the regulations were updated. Bank reserves are higher now than pre-2008. So in fact this is basically like the OP said, regulators regularly mess up, and then update the regulation.
IIRC the Fed is currently removing reserve requirementa because they don't believe they are useful.
Banks have reserves now because the government printed so much money to give them that they can't put it to any use.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…
What this line of reasoning seems to be missing is that society seems to be getting worse largely because of software.
Or is it getting worse because of how the software is used? I will grant that some software seems to only be usable in weaponized ways (e.g., biometric identification at scale), but something like Facebook could be used for _good_ purposes (connecting people) if it weren’t driven by the wrong metrics (e.g., advertising, surveillance, etc.).
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#584I generally agree with this essay, but I think the listed problems with society misses the mark. "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." Is this really changing? I don't buy that people today have less empathy for each other than they did historically. The bulk of human history was cruel in ways that stagger the imagination. "The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening."…
presuming from the domain the author is Canadian and so likely this is more a proximal/recency comment on Canadian society, to which I actually do agree it is really changing.
That's fair, but I think focusing on one region over a limited time period can lead to incorrect conclusions. A single country is not a closed system.
The working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, while the upper class gained tremendous amounts of wealth. One might assume the wealthy seized their gains from the middle class, and this may be true, to some extent.
However, once you widen your lens to a global view, you will see poverty world-wide drastically improved over the same period of time. So the regression of wealth away from the middle class in the US might more accurately be considered as transfer of wealth to the rapidly-industrializing world.
If you are referring to something different that's been happening in Canada, I apologize. I am not very familiar with Canadian history.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And BTW, the person making that argument before the Supreme Court yesterday was a woman, and one of the justices who is going to vote to eviscerate Roe is a woman, so this is not just the patriarchy at work. That conclusion doesn't necessarily follow the supporting statements, though I agree with your overall sentiment.
(also the person, Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, does not to my knowledge identify as a woman)
He wouldn't be a woman even if he tried to identify as one. Everyone else would still identity him as the man that he actually is.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let’s assume (and that’s a big if) that crypto is a fundamentally better foundation to base finance on. Even if it is, we cannot presently know that it is, and we cannot predict what its unique failure scenarios will be and how to counter them. Therefore for me arguing a headlong dive into crypto is indeed like a junior developer arguing for the big rewrite. I also fail to see the fundamental difference between crypt…
I agree that gold and Bitcoin have some very key similarities, but gold and crypto in general are quite different. With regards to Bitcoin, yes they're both stores of value, but Bitcoin has the added ability to transact globally and be much more divisible. Bitcoin seems to have settled into two roles within the greater crypto ecosystem; store of value and reserve currency for the entire crypto economy. Now there are…
Crypto blockchains are a technical boondoggle in a financial system that already has trusted institutions. The whole costly & complex system of blockchain transactions is designed to simulate trust without authorities, I don't see any technical reason why it would be more efficient than a simple encrypted packet + an optimized database that a regulated institution can implement when it doesn't need to simulate trust. Even Proof of Stake is totally unnecessary in a regulated financial system.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#587> Let's build what we already know is right.
Interestingly a friend and I had been discussing political threads and one thing that is interesting is how, in the US, a 2 party system has lead to some really awkward tribalism and many of us think we disagree on everything. But in reality there are some big group wins to be had if the "middle" block of people could somehow band together and agree to just do the intersection of their beliefs.
some examples were citizens united, the big money moving elections, lobbyists, government quid pro quo system is blatant corruption. and I believe a vast majority of the middle agrees corruption is bad.
I just learned about https://www.forwardparty.com/team and it seems like an attempt to address such a thing, would love to hear from anyone who knows much more.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#588Hetzner is super affordable alternative to AWS, now with a DC in US, east coast.
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our broken institutions are fighting to protect their kingdom Three years ago I bought an apartment. I got a loan from a bank over internet and phone. The contract was three pages of clear Swedish that even I, with my rudimentary knowledge of i, could understand. The contract signing was intermediated by a person whose job is to make sure everything goes smoothly. In the end, all of the following was guaranteed : -…
It doesn't always work out well for everybody. Check this out: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-59069662
The key is: it works well for most people. So, the question remains: What exactly does your crypto improve?
And on top of that, in this case, how will it help with the stolen house in Luton?
Re: 100 years of whatever this will be
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well of course there's no way to prove it now. Could you have proved how revolutionary the internet would be in its early days? You have to be open minded and extrapolate from the principles of the new system and its interactions with society at large to _guess_ how impactful it may be. I believe the fundamental principles of crypto (open, permissionless, decentralized, global, neutral, etc.) make it highly likely to…
> Could you have proved how revolutionary the internet would be in its early days? Yes. Yes, you could. 10 years after ARPANet was made public you already had things like France's Minitel. Blockchains? They still have zero use cases: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c... > You have to be open minded and extrapolate Ah yes. "Revolutionary tech", and all you have to do is blindly believe in it…
This zero use cases rhetoric is really low effort. Here are some just off the top of my head.
sovereign store of value (useful if your government sucks)
permissionless payments (funding wikileaks)
private/anonymous transactions (Monero)
event tickets (good use of NFTs)
synthetic assets (anyone/anywhere can speculate on TSLA)
decentralized asset exchange - AMM
decentralized prediction markets
DAO - a new way for people to organize and form internet native companies